Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/39

Rh showed no physical or mental inability to endure the strain of college life, and apparently lost none of the precious bloom of true womanliness. But no sooner had the system become thoroughly established than a whole world of new social problems was discovered in connection with it. The primeval attraction of men and women for each other was not obliterated by the higher education. Conventionality stood aghast at the primitive and unrefined social life sometimes found within college walls. The social tone of these new colleges could not be much higher than that of the rural communities from which it came. It was not to be expected that students from progressive but uncultured communities should at once be transformed into dignified, self-restrained, conventionally proper young men and women.

Eastern scholars and teachers who went West to fill chairs in these colleges were shocked at the crudity which they met; in their eyes and in the eyes of the cultured New Englander all improprieties, unconventionalities, and crudities were the offspring of the vicious principle, coeducation. In New England, consequently, the pressure of social conservatism compelled a less radical solution of the impending problem of woman's education.

Following the type of Vassar, Wellesley, and Smith were founded still with the curriculum based on the old classical model of Harvard and Yale, but with living conditions and social restraints especially intended to preserve and develop womanliness. A liberal allowance of the classics, a little harmless inorganic science, some music or art by way of sweetening, and domestic labor as a reminder of housewifely occupations, constituted the regimen of the typical woman's college. No inducements or opportunities were offered for young women to enter any professions except literature and teaching. Curiously enough, few women could be found prepared to fill the professorships except those who had been coeducated at Oberlin, Michigan, and Cornell, and to them was set the task of preserving femininity by a harmlessly miscellaneous culture.

Meanwhile the great tide of scientific education had risen; the evolutionary theory had been proposed, attacked, accepted by the greater scientists. New fields were thus opened to men, which women as yet could not enter. That which they had supposed would insure to them the highest intellectual life no longer sufficed. In the larger coeducational colleges, laboratories and elaborate scientific equipments were rapidly acquired. Women, more conservative and true to the traditions of higher education, continued to choose classical courses long after science had become the most prominent feature of the younger institutions. Slowly the women's colleges were compelled to add zoölogy and physiology, laboratories and apparatus to their meager courses in science.